Coffee In Purgatory
by LawlietLennoxLove
Summary: It's a rare thing when L wears socks.


L opens his eyes and is pleasantly surprised – although another part of him, one that is flexing and yawning and rolling luxuriously along its shoulders, purrs comfortably that really, he shouldn't be – to find that he is fitted snug against the lazy mess of sheets and covers of a soft and very, very nice bed.

He'd been asleep, and it'd felt good. He forgets how good sometimes, forgets the blessings of a truly undisturbed drift of a small one-person sculling boat through a sea that gently soothes and hushes as it rocks him into deeper layers of unconsciousness.

He never forgets, though, just how wonderful it is not to remember anything at all. But what can he do? When he's awake he has to play many, many parts, but as far as the fallibility of stage-actors go he is not allowed to make a mistake. He must not forget his lines, the hounding fear of any actor, he must not forget _any_ detail, but most pressingly he _must not forget to forget_.

It sounds dramatic, sure, the tragic catch-22 that forces him to live all the different pale-grey shadows of his life in perpetual circles, until they become so mind-numbingly similar, one case after the next, that he can almost believe that there is only one of him, and he aligns it all together as 'L'. Painting himself into a corner as he does so, but reputation traps are not so uncommon as he might like to think, and at least he's done his flawlessly, strikingly, beautifully.

There is nothing beautiful about a creature of pure black-and-white that is all sharp angles and unruly hair and wide, anaemic eyes, like something that _ought _to be long dead, but L is good at believing. It's nothing special, really. Nothing out of the common fare for spies, for example, who would do well to fully believe their own stories, but that's being melodramatic again: _forget_ all that prissy for-king-and-country martyrdom, every insignificant little person does it every day. The human mind is highly subjective, and seamlessly re-interpreting events is nothing more than a common characteristic. Shifting reality to suit its own acceptance, un-breaking a shattered mirror.

L suffers that. L suffers a lot of things. A whole catalogue of sins, all falling under the perfect calligraphic letter 'L'. Derealisation, lack of connection with everything else. Insomnia; lack of sleep. Lack of everything else, too, sympathy and concern and perhaps humanity, perhaps morals, but he's in no mood to forcibly jerk his mind into a gear and burrow into such grey areas. He'll get lost, anyway, buffeted this way and that and left grasping because he himself is grey, and empty for all the things he knows he should have and knows he doesn't. L is but a husk, all the better for filling with different characters from the inside out, because a second skin simply doesn't do the job anymore.

Another thread of L would no doubt sneer that the very act of appointing disorders was an act of narcissism, self-indulgence in the ecstasy of agony. Self-pity. He's entitled, and at the same time _so_ above it, which is _sheer_ narcissism.

He's hungry. He's seen hunger in many forms, too, the sharp jag of greed and desire that spreads like plague and sinks its venom deep into the infected, the possessed, but it doesn't matter now because _he is not L_. He knows, or believes, that right at this moment he is full _L_ and nothing else, which is a neat guarantee that he isn't.

So what is he, then?

He's hungry. That's what.

The earlier voice, the waking-up voice (what of? It's not important; it doesn't have to be _of_ anything. There isn't always a reason, logic doesn't _have _to apply, and L knows this. L knows a lot of things, but he understands very little) is back, like a parent that waits patiently, indulgently for their child to finish their tantrum, or whatever other fit. It's keeping contentedly quiet.

He slips out of the bed, and cards a hand through his hair. For a moment he is disorientated, standing still as he rides out the whirl of dizziness that loops through him, a sure sign of too much sleep, a phenomenon he hasn't experienced in…a long time. Usually sleep only serves to exhaust him in the way that staying up for weeks on end without respite rarely does, remind him of what he's denied himself and tricked his body into not needing, or at least not complaining.

His feet make a soft thocking noise against the floor, and he decides he likes it. He's wearing socks, too, he'd been wearing socks in bed, and it's a pleasant feeling. If the feet are warm, everything else is warm, and L doesn't care much for being cold. Sometimes he is made up of frigid arctic tessellations, an overwhelming intricacy of icy, merciless logic and not much else, and it's such a whiteout that he has to attest to it physically, too. Stand outside without shoes and socks, and wear only a shirt and jeans that billow in the wind that slides cold palms under the fabric, overlooking a complex of skyscrapers that are his life story. He never once flinches.

There is a kitchen, and the door isn't firmly closed, or indecisively half-open, or flung wide in invitation. Maybe it's because there is no door at all. Of course there should be a door, and for a brief illusory flicker L sees a door and doesn't see a door, and sees and doesn't see a door to the room he just left, too, and then he picks his way over and away from the matter of doors.

The kitchen is pleasantly nondescript, and as with the doors, it is colourless. That wasn't to say that it was white, because white is the colour of total restriction and total command and total obliteration, even more so than black. It was simply a colour that didn't register, was there but didn't exist. There weren't enough colours like that, and altogether too many shades of grey. When you see the world in black and white like he so often has too, you realise that it doesn't make _anything_ simpler. Just more grey, more and more grey.

There is a cup of coffee and he lifts it to his lips, the motion practised. There is no heat, no texture to the liquid, no indication that it even passed from the rim of the cup into his mouth at all, but it's bitter. He prefers that to sweet, and he sets the cup down.

He's still not sure that he's still not dead yet.


End file.
